Quentin Tarantino has completed his list. Guesting on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, he announced his 20 best films of the 21st century — only one film allowed per director.
As expected, Tarantino’s list is filled with violent, horror-leaning films, but if the first half (#11–20), announced last week, was met with puzzlement by many, the top half of the list, announced today, is much meatier: a mix of acclaimed and underseen films. Yet it still doesn’t fully adhere to the hive mind, which is why I like this list very much.
You can bash this list all you want, but one thing Tarantino won’t do is reach his hand for the consensus; there’s no “Mulholland Drive,” no “In the Mood for Love,” no “Tree of Life.” These are truly his own favorites.
Easton Ellis points out that he’s “starting to see an aesthetic coming” from Tarantino’s list, one that’s about “entertainment value” and “irreverence” — movies that have an irreverence that’s “not expected from the mainstream of Hollywood, and they’re fun.”
Tarantino replies: “What is iconic to me, what is memorable to me, rather than to match wits with the Arthurs of the world, it’s these experiences. The idea was I didn’t look up anything, I just picked 20 movies straight from my brain, and if I couldn’t remember it, then it doesn’t make it. It had to be memorable. There’s a big thing about the filmmaking. Most of them have aggressive filmmaking. I’m impressed by that.”
Ridley Scott’s “Black Hawk Down” tops the list, and I have to say, sure, it’s not the best of the 21st century, not the best of its decade, but goddamn, it is an intense movie — one that absolutely deserves more love. The fact that Tarantino has put it at the top of his list means it will be getting more eyeballs, more attention, and it is fully deserving of that. Not only is it one of the greatest achievements of Scott’s career, but it’s also one of the best war movies of the last 40 years.
For now, here is the full list, with highly entertaining notes from Tarantino, including his total and utter takedown of Paul Dano, which I found hilarious, and his admission that “Lost in Translation” is what made him want to date Sofia Coppola.
1. Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott)
“I liked it when I first saw it, but I actually think it was so intense that it stopped working for me, and I didn’t carry it with me the way that I should’ve […] Since then, I’ve seen it a couple of times, not a bunch of times, but I think it’s a masterwork, and one of the things I love so much about it is […] this is the only movie that actually goes completely for an ‘Apocalypse Now’ sense of purpose and visual effect and feeling, and I think it achieves it. It keeps up the intensity for 2 hours 45 minutes, or whatever it is, and I watched it again recently, my heart was going through the entire runtime of the movie; it had me and never let me go, and I hadn’t seen it in a while. The feat of direction is beyond extraordinary.”
2. Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich)
“That last five minutes ripped my f*cking heart out, and if I even try to describe the end, I’ll start crying and get choked up […] It’s just remarkable. It’s almost a perfect movie. And we don’t even get to talk about the great comedy bits, which are never-ending. I think people never nail the third film of a trilogy. I think the other one is ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ to me, and this is ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ of animated films. This is the greatest end of a trilogy.”
3. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola)
“I fell so much in love with ‘Lost in Translation’ that I fell in love with Sofia Coppola and made her my girlfriend [laughs]. I courted and wooed her, and I did it all in public; it was like it was out of a Jane Austen novel. I didn’t know her well enough to get together on my own, but I kept going to events […] I spoke to Pedro Almodóvar about this, and we both agreed it was such a girlie movie, in such a delicious way. I hadn’t seen such a girlie movie in a very long time, and I hadn’t seen such a girlie movie like that be so well done.”
4. Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan)
“Another film that I didn’t initially like […] What I now love about it is that I feel there’s a real mastery to it, and I came around to it watching it again and again and again. The first time, it’s not like it left me cold — it was so kind of gobsmacking, I didn’t really know what I saw, it was almost too much, and then the second time I saw it, my brain was able to take it in a little bit more, and then the third time and the fourth time, it was just like, wow, it just blew me away.”
5. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson)
“Daniel Day-Lewis. The old-style craftsmanship quality to the film. It had an old Hollywood craftsmanship without trying to be like that. It was the only film he’s ever done, and I brought it up to him, that doesn’t have a set piece. The fire is the closest to a set piece. This was about dealing with the narrative, dealing with the story, and he did it fcking amazingly. ‘There Will Be Blood’ would stand a good chance at being #1 or #2 if it didn’t have a big, giant flaw in it … and the flaw is Paul Dano. Obviously, it’s supposed to be a two-hander, but it’s also drastically obvious that it’s not a two-hander. [Dano] is weak sauce, man. He is the weak sister. Austin Butler would have been wonderful in that role. He’s just such a weak, weak, uninteresting guy. The weakest fcking actor in SAG [laughs].”
6. Zodiac (David Fincher)
“When I first watched ‘Zodiac,’ I wasn’t that into it, and then it started playing the movie channels, and first thing I knew, watching 20 minutes of it, 40 minutes of it, and I realized this is a lot more engaging than I remember it being, and it kept grabbing me in different sections, so I decided to watch this goddamn thing again, and it was a whole different experience from that point on. I found myself, every six or seven years, watching it again, and it’s a luxurious experience that I give myself over to […] mesmerizing masterwork.”
7. Unstoppable (Tony Scott)
“It’s one of my favorite last movies of a director. I’ve seen it four times, and every time I see it, I like it more. If you asked me years ago, I would have put ‘Man on Fire’ on the list, but ‘Unstoppable’ is one of the purest visions of Tony’s action aesthetic, the two guys are great together, and it gets better and better. It’s one of the best monster movies of the 21st century. The train is a monster. The train becomes a monster. And it becomes one of the greatest monsters of our time. Stronger than Godzilla, stronger than those King Kong movies.”
8. Mad Max: Fury Road
“I was actually not going to see it for the simple reason that in a world where Mel Gibson exists, and he’s not playing Max? I want Mad Mel! Weeks and weeks and weeks passed, and people kept talking about how great it was, and Fred, my editor, was saying, ‘I’m serious, you gotta do it.’ Then I saw it. The great stuff is so great, and you’re watching a truly great filmmaker; he had all the money in the world and all the time in the world to make it exactly as he wanted.”
9. Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright)
“My favorite directorial debut even though he did a cheapie debut movie he doesn’t like to talk about […] I loved how much he loved the Romero universe he recreated. The script is really terrific, it’s one of the most quotable films on this list, I still quote the line ‘the dogs don’t look up.’ It’s not a spoof of zombie movies, it’s a real zombie movie, and I appreciate the distinction.”
10. Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen)
“I really can’t stand Owen Wilson. I spent the first time watching the movie loving it and hating him. The second time I watched it, I was like ‘ah, okay, don’t be such a pr*ck, he’s not so bad.’ Then the third time I watched it, I found myself only watching him.”
In case you missed it, here’s #11-20, announced last week, and by far the more debated section of Tarantino’s list.
11. Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku)
“I do not understand how the Japanese writer didn’t sue [‘Hunger Games’ author] Susan Collins for every fcking thing she owns. They just ripped off the fcking book. Stupid book critics are not going to go watch a Japanese movie called Battle Royale, so the stupid book critics never called her on it — they talked about how it was the most original fcking thing they’d ever read. As soon as the film critics saw the film, they said, ‘what the fck, this is just Battle Royale except PG!’”
12. Big Bad Wolves (Aharon Keshales, Navot Papushado)
“This has got a fantastic script and a similar storyline to Prisoners […] they handle it with guts and balls — you know the American movie wouldn’t do that […]”
13. Jackass: The Movie (Jeff Tremaine)
“This was the movie I laughed at the most in these last 20 years. I don’t remember laughing from beginning to end like this since Richard Pryor […] As I was making Kill Bill, I thought this movie was so f*cking funny I had to show it to the crew. So we found a print, watched the movie, and just died.”
14. The School of Rock (Richard Linklater)
“It was a really fun time at the theaters. It was a real fun, fun, fun screening. I do think this one had the explosion of Jack Black combined with Rick Linklater and Mike White — that made it special […] this is as close to Bad News Bears as we ever got.”
15. The Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson)
“I was laughing a lot during the movie. Not because we were trying to be perverse, laughing at Jesus getting fcked up — extreme violence is just funny to me — and when you go so far beyond extremity, it just gets funnier and funnier. We were just groaning and laughing at how fcked up this was […] Mel did a tremendous directorial job. He put me in that time period. I talked to Mel Gibson about this and he looked at me like I was a f*cking nut.”
16. The Devil’s Rejects (Rob Zombie)
“This rough Peckinpah–cowboy–Manson thing [from Zombie] — that voice didn’t really exist before [in House of 1000 Corpses], and he refined that voice with this movie […] Peckinpah wasn’t part of horror before this. He melded it with sick hillbillies, and it’s become a thing now. You can recognize it across the street, but that didn’t exist before.”
17. Chocolate (Prachya Pinkaew)
“Here’s a movie you probably never heard of […] People getting f*cked up in the most spectacular of ways […] they trained this 12-year-old girl for four years to star in this movie […] this is some of the greatest kung-fu fights I’ve ever seen in a movie.”
18. Moneyball (Bennett Miller)
“Brad Pitt’s performance was one of my favorite star performances of the last 20 years — where a movie star came in and reminded you why he was a movie star and just carried the movie on his shoulders.”
19. Cabin Fever (Eli Roth)
“There’s something so charming. Eli’s sense of humor, sense of gore — it just really, really works. People kind of forget how tense it is in the first half because it gets so genuinely funny in the last 20 minutes […] Hostel might be his best movie, but this is my favorite.”
20. West Side Story (Steven Spielberg)
“This is the one where Steven shows he still has it. I don’t think Scorsese has made a film this exciting [this century]. It revitalized him […] I couldn’t believe I liked the lead [Ansel Elgort] as I didn’t like him in anything else”
